a laboratory for creative research + community engagement

Residencies

So Percussion: where (we) live

2012 Lab Artists: Sō Percussion

Back in 2008 Vermont Performance Lab partnered with the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Rockingham Arts and Museum Project and the Brattleboro Music Center to support produce a new site-specific work by the group So Percussion in Brattleboro and Bellows Falls, Vermont. The residency took place over the spring and summer of 2008 and culminated in two evenings of live performance on the train and in the train depots in Music for Trains on August 8 & 9, 2008. It was a unique partnership that crossed town lines to combine resources, support artists, reach new audiences and serve various communities.

Vermont Performance Lab was pleased to invite the So guys back to Vermont to support the development of where (we) live in May 2012. The two-week residency enabled the quartet to work in the recording studio of Guilford Sound and to work with collaborators and local artists. So asked local artists to improvise, dance, make video and anything else they could think of to both fit into So's artistic world and adjust to fit theirs. VPL presented three work-in-progress showings that featured a different local guest artist each night. Audiences had the opportunity to preview the work before it toured to the Walker Arts Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in the fall 2012.

where (we) live

A Note from Adam Sliwinski

A year and a half ago, I posted a blog entry about our project Where (we) Live. At that time, it was in its earliest gestation. We knew very little about what we wanted to achieve, except that we were going to challenge ourselves to reach outside a collective comfort zone.

So Percussion was founded in the midst of a rigorous chamber music program at Yale. In order to focus on the skill of playing other people's music at a very high level -which is difficult enough to master on its own - we were laser-focused on what it takes to become an accomplished, cohesive group. We've never abandoned this core purpose, and those "10,000 hours" come in handy while making music.